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The Power Of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change the World
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Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaChapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Positive Leaders Create and Share a Positive Vision”
Gordon quotes Alan Mulally on the importance of having a compelling vision and comprehensive plan to move an organization forward. Examples that Gordon cites to show the importance of having positive visions and goals include filmmaker George Lucas’s idea for Star Wars, President John F. Kennedy’s push to send humans to the moon, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of equality.
Positive leaders get ideas and then take the next steps to rally people to create them, but they must be able to articulate their vision clearly and succinctly, as with the Alzheimer’s Association’s motto: “A world without Alzheimer’s” (32). Similarly, the former CEO of Campbell Soup, Doug Conant, shared his vision before every meeting: “To build the world’s most extraordinary food company by nourishing people’s lives everywhere, every day” (32-33). The vision is like a north star that moves everyone in the organization in the right direction. It works because everyone wants to be great and have something to hope for and work toward.
Gordon says that the positive leader must carry both a telescope and a microscope. The telescope helps the team focus on the north star (the big picture). The microscope helps to focus on the things that must be done in the short term to realize the vision in the telescope. A good team-building exercise is to have each person identify their vision and one action they will take to achieve it.
Gordon shares that when Dabo Swinney was the interim head coach of the Clemson football team, a trustee mentioned that Clemson’s program should be like that of other schools with great academics and great football. Swinney replied that his vision was to create a program so good that others wanted to be like them. Clemson began to rack up wins while maintaining its academic success. Swinney dreamed that the team would win 15 games in a row and had the goal printed on a T-shirt. When the team made the playoffs and then lost, he continued to communicate his vision. The team made the playoffs again in 2016 and won the National Championship.
Regarding sticking to one’s vision, Gordon gives the example of running a marathon: Few people quit in the first mile, when they aren’t tired, or the last, when the goal is in sight. The body doesn’t give up because the mind can see the finish line. Most people quit in the 20th mile, when they are physically drained and still have far to go. Gordon encourages people to write down when they experience their 20th mile and then to write, “Keep your vision alive” (38).
In practical terms, a simple way to transform visions into results is for a leader to talk to the people who directly report to them, have their direct reports talk to that group, and so on down the line. During each conversation, the leader should ask each person to say what the vision means to them because a vision must have meaning to individuals in order to come to life. Next, the leader should ask about the person’s personal vision, how it can contribute to the bigger vision, and how the leader can help the person on their journey. Finally, the leader should ask how the person would like the leader to hold them accountable. If managers have this conversation, discussing personal and organizational visions throughout the year, people will feel that their manager genuinely cares about them, and engagement will soar.
Gordon gives an example from his own life: when he decided to sell the three restaurant franchises he owned to focus on his motivational speaking. During this time, he had the idea for The Energy Bus. After 30 publishers rejected the book, he saw some books published by John Wiley and Sons and asked his agent to submit the manuscript to them. An editor bought it, but it wasn’t carried in bookstores in the US. Gordon went on a tour to share the message about the book, and while his stops were not well populated, he met people and booked speaking engagements with them. He attributes his success to having the power, as everyone does, to see a positive future and create it.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Positive Leaders Lead With Optimism, Positivity, and Belief”
Gordon lists reasons why people give up before reaching a goal: “the struggle, the negativity, the frustration, the adversity, the fear, the rejection, the naysayers, and the circumstances that seem insurmountable” (47). One could also say that people give up because they lack optimism, positivity, and belief. Rick Hendrick lists optimism as his primary key to success; faith comes second.
Gordon quotes Donna Orender, former commissioner of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), as saying that you “have to give people excuses to say yes” (48). She first found passion in her coaches and players, then identified the “believers” who believed in them, and so on. She encouraged those in the organization who didn’t believe in the future success of the WNBA to leave. As another example of someone who used the power of optimism and belief, Gordon cites Marva Collins, who started her own school in Chicago to teach children with learning disabilities by stressing positive reinforcement. The students went on to great success.
Leaders who stress positivity must have followers who do the same. William Bratton, New York City’s police commissioner in the 1990s, fired three out of his five borough police chiefs because they didn’t believe that crime could be reduced in their territory. Similarly, when Doug Conant became CEO of Campbell Soup Company, he fired 300 of his top 350 leaders because they didn’t believe that the company could be turned around.
A leader who is not naturally positive can cultivate positivity. Gordon argues that everyone has negative and positive “dogs” fighting inside them. The winning dog is the one that is fed, so leaders must “feed the positive dog” (51). One way to cultivate positivity is to talk to oneself with affirmative phrases instead of listening to one’s negative thoughts. Negative thoughts come from fear, which tends to distort reality: “[T]he truth is that fear is a liar” (52).
Leaders can look at failure and hardship as opportunities for growth. When real tragedy strikes, like 9/11, survivors can tell themselves positive stories about perseverance and faith. One study found that people who seemed to have it all had in fact all experienced misfortune; however, they were able to turn it into fortune by looking for opportunities in their struggles. Drawing on another of his books, Gordon mentions The Shark and the Goldfish, which argues that people have a choice in how to respond to waves of change. They can resist them and wait to be fed as usual (the goldfish) or ride them into the future (the shark). Longing for the good old days is a deterrent to success. Circumstances don’t define people; rather, people define their circumstances.
Gordon points to the ability to “distort” reality as a positive quality for a leader, as when Steve Jobs convinced Apple employees to meet a seemingly impossible deadline. He changed their reality from pessimism to optimism. This is a quality that start-ups often have, as they “dream[] of ways to change the world” (62).
Leadership is a transfer of belief—that is, the leader transfers a vision about what is possible to the team. A positive leader leads with faith despite the world’s negativity: The ultimate battle that leaders face each day is one between faith and fear. The leader’s employees are facing the same battle, and it’s the leader’s job to inspire them. For instance, Dabo Swinney, who led Clemson’s football team to victory, called himself an “over-believer” rather than an overachiever. When his team became champions, he encouraged them all to be champions in life. Ultimately, Gordon says that fear assumes that the future will be negative, while faith believes that it will be positive. Since the future is unknown, it is best to commit to the positive vision.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Positive Leaders Confront, Transform, and Remove Negativity”
Positive leadership involves not just feeding the positive but also “weeding out” the negative. Since positive energy must outweigh negativity if a person or organization is to succeed, it is important that leaders not ignore negativity in their team.
For example, the University of Georgia’s football team had to deal with what the coach called “energy vampires.” The coach, Mark Richt, had a solution. Whenever a player was negative, the team took the person’s picture and put it on a wall with a picture of an energy vampire on it. When Gordon met with another coach, that coach immediately called a meeting of his “energy vampires,” saying, “Why wait?” To build a winning team, a leader must immediately start removing negativity.
The first step, however, should not be to remove but to transform the energy vampires through empathic listening and understanding. Leaders can also clearly establish that people who drain the energy of others will not be tolerated, as the two football coaches did. However, if these efforts fail, the leader should remove the negative team members and allow the others to do their best work. Gordon calls this “feed and weed, weed and feed” (77). He recalls personally meeting with a negative manager at one of his franchises to let him know that he found the manager a different job, only for the manager to tell him that he hated the job and would use the opportunity to leave. Employees who don’t have the power to hire and fire can still strengthen their own positivity and lead by example.
Gordon cites the example of a cofounder of a nurse staffing company who had a “no complaining” rule: Team members could not complain unless they offered one or two possible solutions. The goal was to turn “justified complaints into positive solutions” (80). The complaints were signals about what the company didn’t want, allowing the team to focus on what they did want. Gordon attests to the success of the rule and adds that the leader cannot complain either: Leaders who focus on problems create dysfunctional, negative cultures, while those who focus on solving problems create high-performing cultures, regardless of the team setting or individual talent. He adds that leaders should not be “negative about negativity” but instead must confront it in a positive way (84).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters build on the ideas presented earlier in the text by providing concrete strategies that leaders can use to implement vision, create positivity, and address negativity. Key to all of this is The Need for Effective Communication, which Gordon formally introduces in Chapter 4 in the context of vision. Leaders need not be extroverts, but they must be able to articulate their vision. As he does throughout the book, the author provides practical advice on how to achieve this goal, including using the organizational structure to communicate level by level. This broadens the applicability of his argument, prompting leaders of even vast organizations to consider how they might implement his ideas.
In keeping with Gordon’s emphasis on leaders practicing what they preach, he uses metaphors, parables, and examples to ensure that his own communication is effective. His books often use parables with animal characters to make their points, and in Chapter 5, he recommends feeding the “positive dog” as a strategy for cultivating positivity. In The Positive Dog, from which this example comes, there is a negative dog named Matt and a positive one called Bubba. Gordon similarly references an animal parable from his book The Shark and the Goldfish—about a pampered goldfish and a kind shark—to illustrate that people have a choice in how to respond to change. Such stories give readers a way of visualizing the author’s precepts.
Likewise, in discussing vision, Gordon introduces the metaphor of the telescope and the microscope. The telescope allows the leader to focus on the vision—the big picture. The microscope shows the short-term strategies that the leader will need to achieve the vision. Gordon elaborates on this idea with an example: Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney, whose story also underscores Gordon’s contention that positive leadership is important far beyond the field of business. Swinney’s telescope was his big-picture vision of winning a national championship, while his microscope included tools such as the television he purchased to watch games and practice footage, as this helped him lead his team to victory.
Another metaphor, one likening vision to a “north star,” shows Gordon’s realistic and practical approach. The author acknowledges that a positive leader’s vision isn’t a perfect set of plans; it can’t be since the world is constantly changing. Rather, it is a path forward. Nor is his view of positivity tied to a belief in a higher power, setting him apart from positivity authors such as Norman Vincent Peale. When he discusses belief and faith, as he does in Chapter 5, he is referring to a belief in a positive future. He thus places faith in opposition to fear rather than disbelief.
Gordon’s realism also emerges in his careful delineation of what constitutes genuine negativity. He introduces the concept of energy vampires, people who drain the energy of a group with their complaints and pessimism, in The Energy Bus, and he builds on the concept in this book in the context of leadership. Here again, however, he shows that positivity is not the same as “Pollyanna” optimism; he clarifies, for example, that complaints can even be worthwhile, identifying real pain points in an organization that an emphasis on unthinking optimism would merely ignore. What matters is whether complaints are coupled with a belief that improvement is possible—i.e., suggestions regarding how to address a problem. At the same time, Gordon is also pragmatic about the limits of persuading negative people to cultivate a more constructive approach; in the interests of Establishing a Positive Culture, he says, leaders may have to remove the energy vampires. The author also acknowledges the fact that not everyone has the power to hire and fire, suggesting that such people model positivity from their particular level in the organization.
Gordon’s honesty regarding the possible pitfalls of his approach anticipates potential criticism. Some books on positivity, such as Spencer Johnson’s 1998 Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life, have been criticized by positivity skeptics such as Barbara Ehrenreich. Author of the best-selling 2010 book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, Ehrenreich views positivity as a form of denial and points to Who Moved My Cheese? as a cynical attempt by employers to encourage their workers to accept management changes over which they have no power. With his pragmatic tone and emphasis on keeping workers looped into the conversation, Gordon seeks to preempt such arguments.
Gordon typically has multiple examples for each of his major points. The exception is distorting reality, discussed in Chapter 5, which he associates only with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Though reality distortion is part of the author’s broader argument about the transfer of belief that is required of positive leaders, this singular reliance on Jobs in and of itself communicates how totalizing Jobs’s vision was: It’s as if he changes reality on the page as well, “distorting” Gordon’s typical approach.
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